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Most businessmen have predictable hobbies: reading, golf, tennis. Mine is ranching. Each fall I buy a few hundred calves and then keep them for 11 months, fattening them up with natural grass. Once they’ve gained enough weight, I sell them and restart the cycle. The first year I did this, the results were spectacular. The animals doubled their weight, and their prices were sky-high. In the years that followed, however, something strange happened. I started to buy calves from better farms, but for some reason their average annual weight gain kept dropping, along with my revenues.

Puzzled, I turned for advice to a good friend, whose family has a three-generation history of breeding and fattening cattle. “Claudio," he asked me, "that first year when your animals gained so much weight, where did you buy them?” I told him they came from a dry-land farm with very poor soil and low-quality grass. “See?” he said. “That’s what you want. If you find calves that can survive in a poor and hostile environment, the minute they get to your farm they will blossom.”

Last year I decided to test his advice with an experiment. I bought half of my cattle from a seller with low-quality grass. I have just sold the lot, and the average weight gain was 65%. My friend was right—and his insight applies to people as well as animals.

The best employees and executives are what talent management experts call “portable”—able to effectively transition from one role, company, industry, or country to the next. Most people assume that the best hiring strategy is to find the best performers in a given field and get them on your team, but Harvard’s Boris Groysberg has found that, like those calves from better farms, most people aren’t so portable. One of the best ways he demonstrates this is with a study on equity research analysts moving between Wall Street investment banks. You would expect high portability in these situations: Making such a move, they continue operating in a similar environment, analyzing the same companies in the same sector, working with the same clients. They don’t have to sell their house, move to another state, buy a new house, look for new schools for the children, or help their spouses cope and adjust to a move. What could be easier? Yet Boris has found that while star equity research analysts who stay at one firm continue to shine, the performance of those who move declines quite dramatically in the following year and remains below previous heights even after five years.

Talent is much less portable than we think, because performance isn’t just one P; it is built on five—processes, platforms, products, people, and politics—and most of those you can’t take with you.

Where you come from and where you go to matter. While cattle from fertile farms don’t gain as much weight at regular farms, the survivors of poor environments flourish. Likewise when a star executive moves to a weaker firm, his or her performance is likely to lose its luster; if the person moves to a stronger firm, by contrast, he or she will keep shining. Think about it in practical terms: Should you only embrace candidates from outstanding firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, as many companies do? Or would you be better off following a more counterintuitive strategy and finding the true talents who have managed to thrive at weaker firms?

Teams are important too. When people move together, they tend to do better than when they move alone. Boris has also found that starting something new in a new company (what he calls “exploration”) is much harder than taking over an existing project, team, or unit (“exploitation”). In addition, some types of role are more portable than others: COOs are much less so because their job requires lots of internal knowledge and many relationships; CFOs and other functional experts are usually better positioned to move. You must check for how well an incoming star will fit into your industry given its dynamics, into your organization given its culture and strategy, and into your team given the personalities on it.

Perhaps the biggest key to finding portable talent, however, is another P, potential—the ability to adapt and grow into increasingly challenging roles and business environments. Although today’s best H.R. practices tend to focus on experience and competency fit (making sure that someone’s abilities match those required for the job), in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, that's no longer enough, because the job itself is so likely to change.

Back in 1986, at the start of my career as an executive search consultant, I was asked to find someone for a project manager role at a small brewery owned by Quinsa, a Latin American beverage company. I was working in a new office without a research team (in the pre-Internet era), I’d never even heard the term “competency,” and my client was the only serious beverage industry player in the region, so I was unable to identify a large pool of people with the right industry and functional background for the job. Ultimately, I turned to Pedro Algorta, an executive I’d met in 1981, while we were both studying at Stanford. A survivor of the infamous 1972 plane crash in the Andes, which has since been chronicled in several books and the movie Alive, he was certainly an interesting choice. But he had no experience in the consumer goods business; he was unfamiliar with Corrientes, the province where the brewery was located; and he had never worked in marketing or sales, both key areas of expertise. Still, I had a feeling he would be successful, and Quinsa agreed to hire him. The decision proved to be a smart one. Algorta was rapidly promoted to be the general manager of the Corrientes brewery and then chief executive of Quinsa’s flagship Quilmes brewery. He also became a key member of the team that transformed Quinsa from a family-owned enterprise into a large, respected conglomerate.

Why did Algorta excel? Because he had all the hallmarks of someone with highpotential—that is, the ability to adapt and grow into different and increasingly complex roles and environments. Of course, I first recommended him to Quinsa based on my gut instinct. But having spent the past three decades evaluating executives around the world, tracking their progress and studying the factors that drive exceptional performance, I now know exactly what to look for when assessing potential.

First, the right motivation. High potentials have great ambition and want to leave their mark, but they also aspire to big, collective goals and show deep personal humility.

High potentials also have four other traits:

Curiosity: a penchant for seeking out new experiences, knowledge, and candid feedback, and an openness to learning and change.

Insight: the ability to gather and make sense of information that suggests new possibilities.

Engagement: a knack for using emotion and logic to communicate a persuasive vision and connect with people.

Determination: the wherewithal to fight for difficult goals despite challenges, and to bounce back from adversity.

Algorta succeeded not because he had the right experience or a specific set of skills and competencies but because he had those five characteristics. They were evident during his time in the Andes and throughout his career. To take motivation as an example, in the Andes crash he played a critical yet humble role: providing sustenance for the survivors who would eventually march out to save the group, by melting snow for them to drink and cutting and drying small pieces of flesh from the dead victims to serve as food. He also encouraged his fellow survivors to maintain hope and persuaded them all to condone the consumption of their own bodies, should they die, describing it as “an act of love.” At Quinsa perhaps the best example of the purity of his motives came at the end of his 10-year stint with the company, when, for sound strategic reasons he recommended that it abandon an agribusiness project he was leading, voting himself out of his job.

If you want to keep your calves fat and avoid falling stars, reject the myth of the executive who thrives at all times and in all places. Instead, consider how portable your candidates really are. Understand how the five Ps have played into their performance. And, most important, check that they have the potential to embrace and excel through unrelenting change.